Put down that ‘woke’ hammer; blaming whitey for everything isn’t the solution

If all that you have is a “woke” hammer, then everything looks like a fucking nail. And if you hate whitey enough, you can blame whitey for everything — even five black cops murdering a young black man in a city run largely by black people.

As I indicated in my last post, a central problem that I have with “woke”-ism is that not only does it reduce all of our sociological problems to race and racism, but it also simply reverses the racism of the past; in the past, it was white people good and black people bad, and in today’s topsy-turvy, “woke” sociopolitical environment, it’s black people good and white people bad.

We’re not going by character or conduct — but only by race. Which is — I can’t say it enough — racist.

Even though Tyre Nichols was murdered by five black cops, the “woke” media are falling over each other and twisting themselves into fucking pretzels to find a way to blame Nichols’ murder on anti-black white racism nonethefuckingless.

To be clear, anti-black white racism is indeed the background in which the United States of America was founded, and of course it remains as part of the American backdrop. (Also, of course, there is an ugly history of white racism against Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, et. al. Historically in the United States, whites even have hated other whites, such as how the Irish were discriminated against by other, non-Irish whites.)

However, try using this background racism as your criminal “defense” in a court of law. (Seriously, good luck with that.)

No, in a court of law, you are responsible for your own fucking conduct. The law does not even attempt to sort out how much of your criminal behavior is or is not because of systemic racism.*

An example of the “woke” media that I mentioned above is The Washington Post piece titled “Black Memphis Police Spark Dialogue on Systemic Racism in the U.S.”

If you click on the links naming the three authors of the piece, you’ll see from their photos that all of them look like they just crawled out from their collegiate “safe space” yesterday.

Not to side too much with the Repugnican-fascists, but methinks that today’s young “reporters” indeed have been indoctrinated with “woke”-ism.

To be clear, we need to talk about systemic racism. It’s a thing. It’s been with us Americans for a very long time and it will remain with us for some time to come.

But it’s intellectually lazy, if not also intentionally intellectually dishonest, to think that we can ascribe everything to systemic racism. Again, when all that you have is a “woke” hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Not to pick on The Washington Post; for the most part I think that their reporting and analysis are fairly solid, but can we please please please have some older people — you know, people with some actual life experience — doing more of the reporting than newly minted college grads? (I get it that younger people will work for a lot less money than older people who know when they’re not being paid what they’re worth, but Jesus fuck.)

The aforementioned Post article does contain some useful information — information that contradicts its own headline, actually.

It quotes an Ayanna Robinson saying that “one of the major reasons she thought many people seemed more subdued in response to the Nichols death was that the five officers charged in beating him are Black. If the officers had been White, [she said,] ‘All hell would have broken loose. The city would have been in war.'”

Yup. That’s pretty much what I said yesterday.

The aforementioned Post article also notes:

The Memphis Police Department, which has nearly 2,000 officers, is 58 percent Black, the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city’s 64 percent Black population. Unlike in several recent high-profile police brutality cases, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis, who is Black, and other officials acted swiftly in firing, arresting and charging the Memphis officers in advance of the release of video footage.

So the Memphis Police Department is led by a black woman and 58 percent of its officers are black. It sounds to me like blacks pretty much run the Memphis Police Department.

And that’s fine by me, since the city is 64 percent black; a police department should resemble the city in which it operates.

But how in the fucking fuck can we contort ourselves enough to assert, with straight faces, that even though five black cops in a majority-black police department in a majority-black city led by a black police chief brutally murdered a young black man, it nonetheless was because of whitey?

How about addressing toxic masculinity? How about addressing authoritarianism? How about addressing police brutality?

Oh, we can (and probably will) continue to ignore those problems and still find interesting ways to make everything all about and only about race and racism (which, usually under “woke”-ism, can be perpetrated only by white people, of course — by definition).

But if we do that — if we don’t put down our hammer that’s only in search of “racist” nails and pick up some other tools for fucking once — it’s clear that only more black people are going to die at the hands of cops (cops of all races).

What does it say about us that rather than seek real solutions, we’d rather just knee-jerkingly, “woke”-ly label everything “white racism” — and just be done with it already?

P.S. Also, of course, the “woke” “argument” that the five black cops who killed Tyre Nichols all were just more or less hypnotized by systemic anti-black white racism strips them of their agency. Do we think so lowly of black men that we believe that they have no agency, no free will, but that they are mere puppets of their societal background?

Is that really our “argument”? Because that sounds not only incredibly condescending, but also ironically racist, to me.

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*I know this firsthand; I was an alternate juror on a murder trial in which the defense attorney, who was incredibly lame, tried to claim that his black defendant, on trial for the murder of another black man, was there in the courtroom, being tried for murder, because of racism.

The tactic failed spectacularly. (The defendant was found guilty and is now in prison, by the way; as an alternate juror I didn’t get to weigh in on the verdict, as no regular juror had to drop out, but had I participated in the verdict, I’d have deemed him guilty, as the state’s case against him was strong.)

Why Memphis REALLY is different

Street surveillance video captured the savage beating death of a young black man, Tyre Nichols, by five black cops earlier this month in Memphis, Tennessee. The young black man had tried to flee from the police after they had stopped him for alleged reckless driving, but the information that we have thus far indicates that he posed no serious physical threat to them.

The Atlantic recently ran a commentary by Juliette Kayyem, who worked in the Barack Obama administration, titled “Why Memphis Is Different.”

And while I don’t disagree with most of her arguments — she correctly cites some of the smaller factors as to “why Memphis is different” — there is a glaring omission in her piece.

Kayyem writes:

… But as Friday night [the night of the day that the police videos of the killing of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols were released] unfolded, the protests remained peaceful; news reports showed Americans in various cities righteously and nonviolently demanding justice. We have witnessed many peaceful protests in response to police violence before, but there was one noticeable difference this time around: Rollout of the video footage seemed highly choreographed.

By the time protesters were chanting in the streets, the five officers who had beaten Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, had already been charged with second-degree murder. By the time the video footage of the attack was released, the anger and dismay had already been predicted; law-enforcement and political leaders had issued statements preparing the public for some of the worst police violence this nation has seen. The Memphis police chief likened Nichols’s beating to that of Rodney King in 1991. These officials were right: The footage was brutal, at times unbearable, with Nichols appearing not to resist the officers as they repeatedly struck him. All of this reveals the sad fact that, because of the sheer number of times Americans have now confronted videos of police officers killing Black citizens, public officials have gotten better at managing the shock. …

Again, I agree with most of this, and I agree with Kayyem’s assertion that “the quick firing of the five police officers involved, even before criminal charges were filed, and before the videos were made public … rarely happens, but it is the correct response when the facts are impossible to defend.”

But what Kayyem and others who are “woke” don’t want to talk about is that in today’s “woke” sociopolitical environment, the race of the cop or cops is what matters most when a black person is killed by a cop or cops.

Indeed, take the seminal case of Michael Brown.

The blatant lie quickly spread that in August 2014, young black man Michael Brown had just been walking in his neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri, minding his own business, when a white cop accosted Brown only because of Brown’s race.

The big lie was that Brown put his hands up in surrender, and the white cop just shot him anyway — because Brown was black.*

The Eric Holder U.S. Department of Justice report on the Michael Brown case, which was released in March 2015, tells a whole different story: “Gentle giant” Michael Brown, in actuality, had stolen cigarillos from a storekeeper and also had physically roughed up the storekeeper (this was caught on the store’s surveillance camera).

It was these criminal actions of Brown that drew the police presence to him in the first place.

When the cop — who was (and probably still is…) white — responded to the report of a black male who had stolen cigarillos and saw Brown walking with cigarillos in his hand, he then of course confronted Brown.

Brown responded not by cooperating with the cop — but by trying to take the cop’s gun from him. (Because that always ends well…) And that is why Brown was shot to death by the white cop.

These actual events are quite a different story from the “Hands up — don’t shoot!” myth and meme that immediately came out of the Brown episode. (Repeat a lie early and often, and it easily can become “history.”)

Why do I rehash the myth of Michael Brown?

To prove a point: It was so fucking important to the black community of Ferguson and elsewhere within the United States to turn the Brown case into yet another “example” of white-on-black persecution that the fucking facts of what actually had happened on that fateful day that Michael Brown, who was 18 years old, made a series of poor decisions that ultimately led to his own death, were wholly dispensable.

Making Michael Brown a proxy-martyr in the war between whites and blacks trumped all else.

Tyre Nichols’ death is much more horrific than Brown’s. Why? Because while Nichols had the shit beaten out of him by five cops, there is no report or evidence that Nichols did anything like Brown did, such as to try to relieve a police officer of his gun. If I tried to relieve a cop of his or her gun, I wouldn’t expect it to end well. I wouldn’t expect, however, to be beaten to death by five cops when I posed no actual serious harm to them.

So why no rioting, looting, vandalism, etc. in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death?

Easy answer: Because the five cops who participated in his death are all black. (And also, of course, because the police chief of Memphis is a black woman.)

Nichols’ death by cop doesn’t have the crucial element in it for “woke”sters to be able to exploit it: white cop(s) kill(s) black man.

If just one of the five cops who participated in Nichols’ slow murder had been white, I’m pretty sure that the outcome would have been different.

And that’s because of racism.

Yup — when it’s not what one does, but when it’s what one’s race is, that matters, there is a word for that: racism.

A white cop shoots a black man to death right as the black man is trying to take the cop’s gun away from him: We must act out on that!

Five black cops slowly kill a black man by beating him savagely. Well, the cops were black… We’re not going to act out on that…

Not just to pick on black Americans: Two older Asian men (not the usual suspects) recently committed two separate mass shootings of mostly Asian individuals in California. Eighteen people were killed in the two mass shootings, some of them Latino, but most of them Asian.

Has the Asian American community expressed outrage over these mass killings? No — because they were committed by members of their own racial group.

Hey, don’t fucking attack me for stating what is obvious but unpleasant; instead, ask why all that we really care about in these killings is the race of the perpetrators.

Ask why we turn interracial killings into proxy battles in our ongoing “woke” race wars — and why we so easily shrug off intraracial killings. Ask why we think that it’s A-OK to be killed by a member of our own race, but that it’s an unfathomable injustice to be killed by a member of another race.

This is the central problem that I have with “woke”-ism: It used to be that, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, the ideal sociopolitical situation is that we’re all judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. (And I’d include our conduct as a part of our character, as our character — or lack thereof — dictates our conduct.)

Under “woke”-ism, the snake is devouring its own tail; under “woke”-ism, things have gone so ridiculously far that things have returned to what we were trying to avoid in the first place: in today’s “woke” sociopolitical environment, it’s not character or conduct that matters — it’s only race that matters.

This was something that we’d more or less collectively decided decades ago is wrong — yet incredibly dystopianly, it’s A-OK today.

P.S. No, I haven’t forgotten George Floyd. As I wrote at the time of his murder, he was murdered by a cop — a white cop (to the extent that that matters, and in this case it more likely than not matters to some degree) — and I supported the protestors, even when some of their tactics would be deemed by “polite” society to be “extreme.” (This is not to say that I agree with everything that every protestor or “protestor” did anywhere in the nation using George Floyd’s murder as the pretext.)

I long have believed that you have to take every killing of a civilian by a police officer on a case-by-case basis, based upon the facts (as best as we can ascertain them; video surveillance certainly helps when it exists).

It’s mentally easier, I suppose, to just look at the race of those involved in each police incident, and make a snap judgment based primarily or even solely on the race(s) of the individuals involved. Which is, of course, racist.

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*I don’t capitalize “black” or “white”; that’s another smug, “woke” contrivance, like “Latinx,” that I’m not on board with. Words aren’t actually magic, and we don’t actually help anyone merely by using magic words; we only feel more smug and sanctimonious when we use magic, “woke” words. (Virtue signaling is fun! Actually doing anything for anyone else is not!)

George Floyd did not die for our sins (but he did die because of them)

Getty Images news photo

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin surrealistically cavalierly and slowly murders George Floyd in cold blood in late May 2020 (above). Below, Chauvin is handcuffed and taken into custody in the Minneapolis courtroom yesterday immediately after having been found by a jury to be guilty of murder and manslaughter charges in the death of Floyd.

NBC News image

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to hear that former cop Derek Chauvin most likely will spend many years behind bars after he egregiously murdered George Floyd last year; it’s quite rare that murderous cops ever actually are convicted of murder.

Not to pick on Nancy Pelosi too much — although I think that she should have hung it up years ago — but George Floyd was murdered. Murder is, by definition, involuntary on the part of the victim.

Pelosi, in a speech yesterday, said, “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice.”

Yikes. Dictionary.com says that “to sacrifice,” as Pelosi used the verb, means to “to surrender or give up, or permit injury or disadvantage to, for the sake of something else.”

As many have pointed out, George Floyd obviously did not willingly hand over his life for “justice” — or for a little speech by an overprivileged politico who should have exited the public stage years ago. He was murdered by a white cop whose police department, according to The New York Times, “[uses] force against black people at seven times the rate of whites.”

Pelosi also said in her speech (still addressing Floyd), “because of you, and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.”

I hope that the murder of George Floyd ultimately will result in a more just United States of America, but George Floyd did not exist for the rest of us to be able to use his life in any way, probably especially for our own smug self-comfort.

Until and unless we of white America get that — and put to work in the real world that understanding of how too many of us have regarded the lives of black men (and others) — there will be more murders of black men (and others) who did not have to die at the hands of our police.

It’s too late for George Floyd, but it’s not too late for us to do our best to ensure that our cops stop killing unnecessarily.

His name was Stephon Clark, young father of two, and we failed him fatally

The rather opportunist Al Sharpton plans to attend the funeral of Stephon Clark (pictured above) in my city of Sacramento, California, on Thursday. Clark, the 22-year-old father of two, was shot to death by two Sacramento police officers on March 18 but had had only a smartphone in his hand. A little-discussed wrinkle in this racially charged incident, however, is that one of the two cops who shot Clark to death is black, as is Sacramento’s police chief.

As I’ve noted before, you have to take these cases of cops killing black men case by case. There is no one-size-fits-all narrative, as politically convenient and personally satisfying as such narratives may be.

For instance, Eric Garner, in my book, was murdered, choked to death by a thug posing as a police officer.

And Walter Scott by any reasonable person’s book was murdered, shot in the back as he ran away from a coward posing as a police officer.

Both black men were unarmed. Garner’s “crime” for which he was put to death by cop was illegally selling cigarettes on the street, and Scott’s was a broken brake light. The cop who murdered Garner remains free, while the cop who murdered Scott sits in prison (albeit he technically was found guilty of civil rights violations, not of murder).

Again, each case must be taken by itself. The Michael Brown case, for instance, spawned a movement that was based on some lies, probably especially the ubiquitous “[my] hands [are] up — don’t shoot!” meme.

The Barack Obama/Eric Holder U.S. Department of Justice’s own final report on the Michael Brown matter found that the physical evidence, including the autopsy of Brown, corroborated white cop Darren Wilson’s version of what had happened, which is that “gentle giant” Brown had not tried to surrender to him with his hands raised in the air, but instead had attacked him and tried to take his pistol from him.

The last page of the Obama/Holder DOJ report concludes:

… As discussed above, Darren Wilson has stated his intent in shooting Michael Brown was in response to a perceived deadly threat. The only possible basis for prosecuting Wilson under section 242 would therefore be if the government could prove that his account is not true – i.e., that Brown never assaulted Wilson at the SUV, never attempted to gain control of Wilson’s gun, and thereafter clearly surrendered in a way that no reasonable officer could have failed to perceive.

Given that Wilson’s account is corroborated by physical evidence and that his perception of a threat posed by Brown is corroborated by other eyewitnesses, to include aspects of the testimony of Witness 101, there is no credible evidence that Wilson willfully shot Brown as he was attempting to surrender or was otherwise not posing a threat.

Even if Wilson was mistaken in his interpretation of Brown’s conduct, the fact that others interpreted that conduct the same way as Wilson precludes a determination that he acted with a bad purpose to disobey the law. The same is true even if Wilson could be said to have acted with poor judgment in the manner in which he first interacted with Brown, or in pursuing Brown after the incident at the SUV.

These are matters of policy and procedure that do not rise to the level of a Constitutional violation and thus cannot support a criminal prosecution. Cf. Gardner v. Howard, 109 F.3d 427, 430–31 (8th Cir. 1997) (violation of internal policies and procedures does not in and of itself rise to violation of Constitution).

Because Wilson did not act with the requisite criminal intent, it cannot be proven beyond reasonable doubt to a jury that he violated 18 U.S.C.§ 242 when he fired his weapon at Brown.

VI. Conclusion
For the reasons set forth above, this matter lacks prosecutive merit and should be closed.

Indeed, case closed. Legally, anyway, but the myth of Michael Brown lives on, because the myth still is politically useful and personally satisfying to so many.

Unfortunately, in the Brown case the black community rallied around the wrong case. If I had ever tried to take a cop’s gun away from him (or her), I wouldn’t expect to be sitting here typing this sentence — and I am a white male.

The Brown case unfortunately immediately was turned into an inherently-racist-and-murderous-white-cop-vs.-inherently-innocent-young-black-man-guilty-only-of-being-black myth. According to the DOJ report on the Brown case, bystanders had lied through their teeth about what they had witnessed — very apparently in order to perpetuate the lie that every time a white cop shoots a black male, it only can be rooted in racism (and not, say, in very immediate self-defense because the black male is trying to take your gun from you).

The recent shooting death here in Sacramento of 22-year-old black man Stephon Clark also has some wrinkles that aren’t convenient to the aforementioned narrative that (only) white cops shoot young black men willy-nilly: One of the two cops who are reported to have shot Clark to death is black (see here too), as is Sacramento’s police chief, Sacramento native Daniel Hahn.

Hahn has said that he suspects that Clark was the man reported to have been breaking the windows of vehicles in a Sacramento neighborhood on March 18 before he was confronted by two cops in his grandparents’ backyard and shot to death.

All that Clark had in his possession, however, was a smartphone, and from the police helicopter video of the shooting, I cannot see that it was necessary for Clark to be shot even once, much more 20 times.* (A police body-camera video of the shooting that also was released does not give any more insight than does the helicopter video, other than that the cops apparently were trigger-happy; I struggle to even see Clark in the body-cam video at all until a while after he has been shot and is on the ground.)

I am not an expert in the excusable use of police force, but in the videos I don’t see Clark raising anything in the direction of the police officers or otherwise appearing to pose an immediate threat to them; I only see him being shot many times, apparently even after he already has fallen to the ground.

In the police helicopter video, before he is shot by the two cops it certainly looks like Clark isn’t up to any good, but running from police, probably especially if you are a black man, isn’t in and of itself indicative that you are dangerous and/or criminal; it always could be that you’re simply scared of being shot 20 times.

And even if Clark is guilty of having committed property crimes, there are penalties for that — and those penalties don’t include summary execution.

And it’s probably fair to say that many if not most white (and many other non-white) people do need to learn that human life — all human life — is far more important than is fucking property.

All of that said, it largely to totally has been ignored in the local protests over Stephon Clark’s shooting death that one of the cops who shot him — and the city’s police chief — are black. And I have to suspect that that’s because those two pieces of information aren’t convenient to the narrative that it’s only ever white cops and white chiefs of police who unjustly shoot and who support the unjust shootings of black men.

Sacramento has had some localized protests since Clark’s death, but it’s not at all like the city has been shut down, and to my knowledge not one person even has been hospitalized because of the protests. So it’s not like Sacramento has been enveloped in a conflagration, and many more Sacramentans have been touched by the heavy local media coverage than those who actually have been touched by any of the localized protests.

And again, I have to wonder if that outcome might have been different — if the protests might even have turned deadly — if Sacramento’s police chief weren’t black and if one of the two cops who shot Clark weren’t black. Does the race of the actors, rather than the acts themselves, matter that much? I suspect that it does.

Nonetheless, we need to continue to have the discussion about race and policing, and we have to examine where racism and police culture overlap, because very apparently there is a police culture that all cops can get sucked into, regardless of their race, and very apparently part of that police culture is the underlying belief that black lives do not matter as much as do white (and other non-black) lives.

And unnecessary police shooting after unnecessary police shooting amply proves that we must develop — and require the use of — non-lethal ways of neutralizing those we suspect of having committed a crime and/or of being about to commit a crime.

And for fuck’s sake we must stop executing people on the spot for property crimes, and we must hold every human being’s life as sacred. And we must prosecute — really prosecute — cops who don’t value human life, just as we prosecute the criminals who don’t value human life.

If we learn nothing else from the case of Stephon Clark, we need to learn that much.

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*Since almost everyone in the world but I carries a smartphone, it seems to me that cops now have complete immunity to mistake or “mistake” smartphones for hand-held weapons. That is something with which we must as a society grapple — and fix.

The cultural war on white people

So popular within the American culture is the war on white people that the blue-eyed devil is the biggest villain in the very popular HBO TV series “Game of Thrones.” Just sayin’.

That headline is intentionally provocative, but it’s not entirely hyperbole. Discussion of civil rights and racial equality and interracial relations has, over the past few years, increasingly become less and less about reconciliation with whites and more and more about the demonization of and revenge against whites.

And it’s ironic, because many if not most of those seeking revenge against whites are non-whites (mostly black Americans) who have not directly been touched by the worst of what white Americans perpetrated upon non-whites (mostly black Americans) throughout U.S. history. (I think that I have fairly privileged non-white college students in mind the most.) And many if not most of the demonized whites of today have not perpetrated the worst of what white Americans perpetrated upon non-whites throughout U.S. history; they were just born white.

A dream was deferred — and racial revenge has been deferred, too.

The popular message to whites today is that you’re evil because you were born white. You cannot escape your whiteness, and therefore you cannot escape your evil, you blue-eyed devil.

This message is contained in even just the title “Dear White People” — the title itself is so offensive (“Dear Black People” or “Dear Hispanic People” or “Dear Asian People” wouldn’t be OK, but “Dear White People” is perfectly OK, you see, because all white people are evil) that I haven’t been able to get into either the movie or the TV show of that name.

I did get all the way through “Get Out,” the black-paranoia suspense movie in which the central message very apparently is that every white person is an anti-black racist and that no white person can be trusted by any black person.*

I guess that the white actors who appeared in “Get Out” thought that they were being good guilty white liberals by participating in this movie whose central purpose apparently is to tell its primarily black audience that Yes, you’re right, every white person is evil and is out to get you, and, given enough time, will betray you eventually.

That’s such a healthy message.

And this message was “confirmed” in the fairly recent incident in which Bill Maher bizarrely and unfunnily referred to himself as “a house nigger” on his HBO politicocomedic talk show.

Maher was “outed” as just yet another secret white supremacist, you see — his having had many black guests on his show over the years, his $1 million donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and his black ex-girlfriends obviously all were just elaborate cover for his greatest love, which is, of course, to practice white supremacism — and so on his next show he had to undergo the obligatory flagellation (Bad white man! Baaad!). It was a fucking debacle.

As I have noted before, while white Americans were evenly split between Bernie Sanders and Billary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary elections and caucuses, what helped Billary win the nomination is that black Americans supported her over blue-eyed devil Bernie by a margin of three to one.

Ironically, the true blue-eyed devil was and remains Billary, but no matter.

And I expect Bernie to face anti-white (and anti-Semitic) sentiment from black voters again should he run for 2020. But we’re not even to talk about these facts, since they don’t fit the anti-white, only-whites-can-be-racist narrative that is so en vogue.

But could it be that treating a whole race of people like demons might actually induce some of them to act like demons, in a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, that has happened to some blacks due to the white demonization of them, has it not? Why wouldn’t it work in the opposite direction?

Lest you think that I’m going overboard here, there are these concluding paragraphs in Slate.com writer Jamelle Bouie’s piece on the recent KKK rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (to protest the removal of Confederate “hero” statues):

… But while the Klan is a faded image of itself, white supremacy is still a potent ideology. In August, another group of white supremacists — led by white nationalist Richard Spencer and his local allies — will descend on Charlottesville to hold another protest.

Unlike the Loyal White Knights, they won’t have hoods and costumes; they’ll wear suits and khakis. They’ll smile for the cameras and explain their positions in media-friendly language. They will look normal — they might even be confident. After all, in the last year, their movement has been on the upswing, fueled by a larger politics of white grievance that swept a demagogue into office.

The Klan, as represented by the men and women who came to Charlottesville, is easy to oppose. They are the archetype of racism, the specter that almost every American can condemn.

The real challenge is the less visible bigotry, the genteel racism that cloaks itself in respectability and speaks in code, offering itself as just another “perspective.”

Charlottesville will likely mobilize against Spencer and his group, but the racism he represents will remain, a part of this community and most others across the United States. How does one respond to that? What does one do about that?

I’ve been reading Bouie for years now, I believe it has been, and for the most part his discussions on racism and race relations have been fair, balanced and insightful, which you often don’t find in the discussion.

But the spirit of the paragraphs above is disturbing. Its message is that no white person can be trusted; we can’t go by the type of clothing anymore, so we can only go on the color of the person’s skin. Indeed, Bouie’s sentiment above mirrors the central thesis of “Get Out”: “The real challenge is the less visible bigotry, the genteel racism that cloaks itself in respectability and speaks in code, offering itself as just another ‘perspective.’ … What does one do about that?”

Indeed, if every white person probably is the enemy, what do you do?

Apparently the only hope that a white person has these days to get acceptance from non-whites, especially blacks, is to denounce his or her entire evil race in the strongest terms possible and to state strong agreement with every word stated by non-whites. But even that isn’t enough, you see, because the denunciations of one’s own evil, white race and the claims of sympathy and empathy with the non-white probably aren’t sincere. They’re probably just a cover-up for the blue-eyed devil’s true, inborn evil.

We cannot continue to “function” this way, not if we ever want interracial reconciliation. But therein lies the rub: Many (if not most) non-whites (blacks especially, very apparently) don’t want interracial reconciliation, because their entire identity is wrapped up in being a perpetual victim of the blue-eyed devil. (Often, even their income depends on it.) This victimization (real or fabricated) must continue for their identity (and, sometimes, their income) to remain intact, so they continually will find “proof” of this victimization whether it even exists or not.

I surmise that Bouie asked his concluding question (“What does one do about that?”) rhetorically, but I’ll answer it anyway:

You don’t worry about what other people think of you, as you have no control over that, for the very most part. You do, however, become concerned if anyone’s bigotry or hatred translates into words or actions that are meant to harm you.

As a gay man, I know that there are plenty of heterosexuals out there who claim to support equal human and civil rights for us non-heterosexuals but who actually are quite homophobic. Since we’re on the subject, I’ll add that more white Americans (64 percent) than black Americans (51 percent) support same-sex marriage (which to me is a pretty good litmus test for homophobia), so, it seems to me, a black stranger that I come into contact with is more likely to be homophobic than is a white stranger.

And as a white man I never know, when I approach, for the first time, a non-white person (perhaps especially a black person, given the ugly history between the two races in the U.S.) whether or not he or she hates whitey or whether he or she is willing to give me a chance (I do, after all, have blue eyes…).

But I don’t lose sleep over whether or not someone is an anti-white racist and/or a homophobe. Ignorance, bigotry and hatred would be and would remain that person’s problem — until and unless he or she committed a word (such as “faggot,” which black boxer Floyd Mayweather shouted at white boxer Conor McGregor on Friday**) or words and/or a deed or deeds that made it my problem.

I’d give that same advice to Jamelle Bouie and to every other black person with whom I can be an ally as long as he or she doesn’t have an intractable “Get Out”-style perception of me, just waiting until I finally, inevitably demonstrate my “true colors” (because I have, you know, just traded my pointy white hood for khakis).

P.S. I have been following “Game of Thrones” for years now and await tonight’s season-seven premiere, but the fact that the show’s biggest baddies are blue-eyed “white walkers” — the symbolism of that — hasn’t been lost on me…

—

*The movie has its fatal flaws, of course, such as the central plot contradiction that anti-black white supremacists want their brains transferred into the bodies of black people.

Of course, contained within that contradiction actually is black supremacism — the idea/belief that it’s actually better to possess a black body than a white body, because if it weren’t, then why would these racist whiteys steal black bodies to inhabit?

Of course, plot contradictions in “Get Out” are to be pushed aside, because, again, its central, apparently-very-appealing-to-some message (aside from black supremacism, ironically) is that every white person is out to get every black person.

**To be fair and balanced, Conor McGregor, very apparently no towering genius himself, has made anti-black racist comments, but, to my knowledge, McGregor isn’t gay, and so when Mayweather hurled the epithet “faggot” at him, those of us who actually are “faggots” were just collateral damage, you see, and I don’t believe that Mayweather’s homophobia is at all uncommon among black Americans, who routinely hypocritically claim that ignorance, bigotry and hatred always belong to someone else.

The ‘Only Black Lives Matter’ set is only worsening the black-white division

Kori Ali Muhammad, who on April 18 in Fresno, California, slaughtered three white men for the crime of being white men, proclaimed from his jail cell, “They tell black people all the time to get over it. So I say get over it. There will be no pity party.” That view apparently is shared by many if not most of the “Only Black Lives Matter” set, who, like Muhammad, apparently view the cold-blooded murder of three white men as somewhere on the spectrum of nothing to worry about at all to wholly justifiable, given the ugly history of race relations in the United States of America.

Earlier this month, 39-year-old Kori Ali Muhammad, a black man, went hunting for white people in Fresno, California.

Apparently he more specifically was hunting for white men, because he shot four white men, killing three of them: Zackary David Randalls, 34, of Clovis; Mark James Gassett, 37, of Fresno; and David Martin Jackson, 58, of Fresno.

The news media widely called these shootings “random,” because Muhammad didn’t know any of his victims personally, but no, they weren’t fucking “random.” The victims were profiled by their race and sex — even though, as Muhammad said himself of Fresno, “Black people are not being gunned down by police or hung [sic] in trees. It’s fairly civilized here.”

As a white man, albeit a left-wing gay white man, of course this news hit home. Had I been in Fresno that day, I could have been one of Muhammad’s victims, based upon my appearance alone. I mean, I fit his profile.

I don’t live far away from Fresno, and should a black supremacist nut job decide to go hunting for white men in my city, I could be his victim.

(Of course, the chance that any of us is going to be gunned down in the street by someone we don’t know is quite low; we’re much more likely to be killed in a car wreck, so I’m not worried about being out and about.)

I didn’t write about the Fresno slaughter because Muhammad, although he clearly is racist, clearly is insane — “This is bigger than me. This is just a warning. If America does not treat black people right, it will be destroyed by God,” he told the Fresno Bee of his murderous rampage on white men — and because news stories about an extremist and/or mentally ill member of one racial group doing something awful to a member of another racial group so often are taken, by the ignorant and the opportunist, to signify that all of the members of the offender’s racial group are evil.

For instance, I certainly don’t want to be grouped together with Dylann Storm Roof, the 23-year-old white-supremacist nut job who in June 2015 shot and killed nine members of a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the hopes of starting a race war.

I was horrified by that race-based massacre, and I made a donation to the church where it took place.

It is tragic and outrageous that any individual of any race should be murdered in cold blood by a racist because of his or her race.

But the outrage and the tragedy isn’t felt by everyone (which is why I’m writing about the Fresno slaughter now).

To wit, Chauncey De Vega, Salon.com’s resident Only Black Lives Matter writer, who in his latest piece (rather directly and revealingly titled “Why I Don’t Write About Anti-White Hate Crimes Like the Fresno Murders”) pretty much admits that he makes a living by stoking racial tensions (à la Al Sharpton, I suppose), writes in the piece that he’ll start writing about anti-white hate crimes committed by blacks when white people show him what he deems to be the sufficient level of concern about anti-black hate crimes committed by whites.

Wow.

If the race of the victim of a race-based hate crime is what matters to you before you can show empathy or concern over the wrongdoing (even when it’s murder), then you’re a fucking racist yourself. You don’t care about humanity as a whole; you care only about the members of your own race, which makes you a racial supremacist. There is no fucking way around that.

I do not argue, of course, that whites and blacks, as groups, are on equal footing in the United States of America. Of course they are not. They never have been and very well may never be.

But we don’t interact with entire groups of people. We only can interact with other actual human beings.

In De Vega’s worldview and argumentation, he shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the three white men who recently were slaughtered in Fresno because of all of the horrible things that other white men have done to other black people throughout history up to the present.

Just: Wow. Has white racial hatred made so many blacks equally hateful? Racial hatred seems to be pretty contagious to me.

De Vega’s given reasoning for why he doesn’t write about anti-white murders by blacks is almost convincing. He writes (the links are his):

… I chose to not write about the murders in Fresno because I try to be a voice for the voiceless and the marginalized. Kori Ali Muhammad has been arrested. He will almost certainly be punished to the fullest extent of the law. As documented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights organizations, black and brown people who kill white people are sentenced much more severely than whites who kill people of color. Because of this fact, Muhammad is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. (California has not executed anyone since 2006, but if he’s convicted he might well be a candidate for this.)

Anti-white hate crimes are extremely rare in the United States. To obsess over them is an akin to Herman Melville’s fictional Captain Ahab chasing his great white whale.

There are other matters more deserving of my time and attention. [!]

Since Donald Trump’s election there has been a record increase in hate crimes against people of color, Jews and Muslims. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as president, there has also been a large increase in the number of white supremacist hate groups. …

Because it doesn’t fit his narrative of black people good, white people bad, De Vega doesn’t tell you that during the Obama years, the number of black supremacist hate groups (yes, those groups exist) also grew significantly; in 2008 there were 112 of them, and in 2016 there were 193 of them, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (to which I have donated and encourage you to, too), which also notes that in 2016, there were 130 Ku Klux Klan groups in the U.S.

I have to suspect that the main reason that De Vega and his ilk don’t want to talk about black-on-white crime is that it doesn’t fit their politically and personally rewarding narrative that it’s only ever that blacks are the victims of whites; blacks always are the victims and whites always are the perpetrators, not just in crimes but even in everyday conflicts and disagreements.

So when things like the Fresno slaughter make the news, it’s wildly inconvenient. Cognitive dissonance is a beeeeyotch.

But De Vega’s claims about the statistics overall seem to check out, although his snark about “chasing [a] great white whale” is quite hyperbolic, based upon the actual statistics. The Chicago Tribune noted in January of this year:

The horrific beating of a mentally disabled white man in Chicago by four black assailants broadcast on social media is highlighting anti-white hate crimes at a time of increased racial strife in the United States. [I wrote about the Chicago incident here.**]

But federal statistics and experts say anti-white incidents remain a smaller percentage of overall hate crimes. Anti-black hate crimes are still the largest number of cases.

According to the 2015 FBI hate crime statistics, the latest available, there were 613 anti-white-related crimes out of 5,850 total cases. That’s around 10.5 percent of all reported hate crimes, and within the yearly average, federal numbers show. [To me, 10.5 percent isn’t “extremely rare,” as De Vega claims anti-white hate crimes are. To me, “extremely rare” would be something like 1 percent to maybe a few percent.]

By comparison, the FBI reports there were 1,745 anti-black hate crimes or about 30 percent of all reported incidents.

Jews were the most targeted religious group that year and were victims of 11 percent of all hate crimes. It’s not clear how many anti-Jewish hate crime victims also may have been attacked because of their race. …

Of course, there are a lot more white people to commit race-based hate crimes against blacks than there are blacks to commit race-based hate crimes against whites. Non-Hispanic whites make up about 62 percent of the American population, whereas blacks make up only about 13 percent. If we’re going to talk about the percentage of hate crimes, we have to look at the relative size of the population of the offenders.

Again, I wholly concede De Vega’s point that historically and presently, black Americans, who always have been outnumbered by white Americans, have had it a lot harder than have white Americans. That is inarguable.

But I find it incredibly cold-hearted to be able to feel nothing for the victim of a hate crime because he or she isn’t a member of one’s own group.

De Vega’s column, methinks, demonstrates that for many (if not even most) black Americans, “Black Lives Matter” truly means “Only Black Lives Matter.”

Whether the “Only Black Lives Matter” stance is justified or not — De Vega apparently believes that it is, but I have real problems with his apparent argumentation that compassion for the individual in the present should be disregarded because we should focus instead on entire groups of people throughout history to the present — I can tell you that the “Only Black Lives Matter” stance is not going to win a national (that is, a presidential) election.

And that’s because, again, around 62 percent of Americans still are guilty of the crime of having been born white.

And to tell them, the majority of Americans, that for a white person to murder a black person in cold blood out of racism is dead wrong and should induce us to take our anger to the streets — but that it’s not even worth our attention when a black person murders a white person in cold blood out of racism — is not the way to get them on your side.

Indeed, I surmise that, perversely ironically, the “Only Black Lives Matter” set is largely responsible for the rise of “President” Pussygrabber. If we’re going to say that white racism brought us “President” Pussygrabber — an awfully convenient excuse to wholly ignore what an incredibly shitty campaign that Repugnican-Lite sellout Billary Clinton ran — I’d say that it wasn’t only white racism, but black racism, too, that accomplished that wonderful feat.***

And memo to the “Only Black Lives Matter” set: You can’t win a presidential election with 13 percent of the population. That’s just math. You need allies, and you don’t gain allies by telling them that they’re evil because they don’t kiss your ass in the manner in which you decree they should kiss your ass.

In the end, the only way that race relations in the United States can improve is within our one-on-one interactions. Entire groups of people don’t interact with each other; only we as individuals interact with each other — as individuals.

If we’re going to see each other as only a representative of the worst of an entire group of people instead of as individuals, of course racism never is going to change.

Unfortunately, there are too many individuals out there whose entire sense of identity — and even some whose incomes — are based upon keeping racial differences alive and well.

—

*The Southern Poverty Law Center writes of black supremacist hate groups:

… Although the Southern Poverty Law Center recognizes that much black racism in America is, at least in part, a response to centuries of white racism, it believes racism must be exposed in all its forms. White groups espousing beliefs similar to black separatists would be considered clearly racist. The same criterion should be applied to all groups regardless of their color.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Violence begets violence; hate begets hate; and toughness begets a greater toughness. It is all a descending spiral, and the end is destruction — for everybody. Along the way of life, someone must have enough sense and morality to cut off the chain of hate.” …

Yup.

Also, I’ll note that while I use the term “black supremacist,” the Southern Poverty Law Center uses the term “black separatist.” To me the terms are synonymous, as white separatists of course are white supremacists.

**I wrote:

… Before any white people get all indignant and high and mighty over this unfortunate case, we must remind ourselves that also in the news is the ongoing trial of 22-year-old white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof, who shot and killed nine black church members in cold blood in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015.

Just as Roof is not representative of all white people, the four young black people who appropriately have been charged with hate crimes against the mentally disabled young white man (yes, black-on-white crime can be a hate crime, even though there are plenty of assholes and idiots who would claim otherwise) are not representative of all black people.

A minority of the members of all races are capable of inhumanity to other human beings, ranging from verbal abuse to torture to murder.

It’s ridiculous for the right or the left or for any member of any race to use incidents of race-related crimes to indict all or most of the members of an entire race.

These ugly race-related crimes come crashing into our national consciousness via the media, and the media should report them, but we shouldn’t take the incidents out of context, assert that they represent a larger pattern that they don’t represent, or try to selfishly use the incidents to reinforce our own pre-existing, narrow racial-political worldviews and agendas — or, worst, try to use the incidents as an excuse to commit our own crimes against other human beings, feeling “justified” in doing so. …

***Not only did the “Only Black Lives Matter” set, with their black supremacist worldview, offend some whites to the point that they were more likely to vote for Pussygrabber, but in the primary elections and caucuses, blacks supported Billary Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a ratio of about three to one.

I believe that blacks rejected Sanders largely if not mostly because they perceived him to be just another old white man. (How much black anti-Semitism played a part in blacks’ rejection of Sanders I can only guess, but apparently anti-Semitism is significantly higher among blacks than it is among whites.)

So out of their anti-white racism (and possibly if not probably also out of their anti-Semitism), the “Only Black Lives Matter” set supported the weaker Democratic presidential candidate, Billary Clinton (seen as the “black” candidate, despite her record and her husband’s record of harming blacks), helping to put Pussygrabber in the White House.

Way to go!

2020 is going to look a lot like 2016

Boston Globe photo

Progressives U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared together in Boston last week, as pictured above. Far from having gone away quietly, Sanders is fighting for such progressive goals as single-payer health care and free tuition at public colleges and universities. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think that the 2020 presidential election won’t devolve into another fight between real Democrats (that is, actual progressives) and corporate, sellout Democrats who think that craven identity politics is a political cover for the establishmentarian, pro-corporate, anti-populist, ultimately treasonous Democratic Party to continue to ignore income inequality and to continue to support the socioeconomic status quo.

Bernie Sanders is, I think, going to run for the presidency again in 2020.

He hasn’t ruled it out, and he has remained in the public eye since the preventably disastrous November 2016 presidential election.

He put a book out in November (and his progressive comrade Elizabeth Warren has another book due out later this month), and while the establishment Democrats’ “plan” remains to just sit back and watch the Repugnican Tea Party, under the “leadership” of “President” Pussygrabber, implode (or explode, I suppose), Bernie is out there advocating for a progressive agenda that would improve millions of lives (as is Elizabeth).

Bernie will introduce legislation for single-payer health care, totally bypassing the bogus argument of corporate-friendly Obamacare vs. corporate-friendly Trumpcare (and necessarily so), and he and Warren have introduced legislation for free in-state community college and public four-year college tuition.

Oh, that shit can’t pass, I hear even so-called Democrats mutter.

Um, leadership is about leading — not following. Leadership is about convincing people to go in a new, better direction. Leadership isn’t about watching and waiting for your inept political opponents to hang themselves, and then to continue to stick with the status quo. Nor is leadership about jumping on board something that is progressive only after it’s clearly politically safe to do so, since the majority of the electorate already has gone in that direction (Billary Clinton, for instance, didn’t jump on board the same-sex-marriage bandwagon until after it was safe to do so, after the majority of Americans had already gotten there first [to be fair, ditto for Barack Obama]).

Actual leadership is selfless, it’s hard, and it can be risky — which is why the worthless, sellout, do-nothing establishment “Democrats” don’t lead, but follow.

Unfortunately, Bernie 2020 probably would run into what Bernie 2016 ran into: anti-white racism.*

Yup. I said it.

Bernie was rejected by many, many so-called Democrats primarily if not solely because of his demographics — they wrote him off as just another old white man. He was, yes, racially profiled.

How else to explain that Billary Clinton won the support of 76 percent of black Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers, while Bernie won the support of only 23 percent of them?

Bernie was less well known than Billary, that’s why, you might argue, but then there is this contrasting (and inconvenient) fact: among white Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers, it was much more evenly split — 48.9 percent supported Billary, while 49.1 percent supported Bernie, a difference of only 0.2 percent.

Clearly, there was something racial going on.

And it’s interesting that black Americans supported Billary Clinton to the degree that they did; the Clintons brought us “welfare reform,” a crime bill that filled our prisons disproportionately with non-whites, the job-killing NAFTA, etc.

Maybe blacks still struggle at least in part because they tend to vote against their own best interests. Just sayin’. (And I’m not picking on blacks — many, many Americans routinely vote against their own best interests, such as the poor and working-class white people who voted for Pussygrabber for president.)

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, wrote this of Billary Clinton in February 2016:

Hillary Clinton loves black people. And black people love Hillary — or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded.

Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously.

Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required.

Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of black voters can be found. According to some polls, she leads Bernie Sanders by as much as 60 percent among African Americans. It seems that we — black people — are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play.

And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show.

It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries.

Now Hillary is running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed, and the dismantling of the vast prison state — many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life.

Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.

What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?

No. Quite the opposite. …

Read Alexander’s article, and fuck, just Google “What did the Clintons do for black Americans?” (While you’re at it, Google “What did Obama do for black Americans?”)

Clearly, black Americans had no logical reason to vote for Billary over Bernie, certainly not at the rate of 76 percent to 23 percent.

Still, myths die hard. Blacks understood that they were “supposed” to vote for Billary, and so they did.

And the race-based Bernie bashing continues. There were those black-supremacist idiots who called a crowd gathered for Bernie Sanders “white supremacist liberals” while they shut down Bernie’s planned speech in Seattle in August 2015. They had no coherent anti-Bernie argument; indeed, I’m sure that they were mostly if not wholly unaware of his record (including the NAACP’s having given him a score of 100 percent on their agenda [and former NAACP head Ben Jealous went on to endorse Bernie]). Bernie’s record didn’t matter to these black supremacists, you see, because Bernie’s sin was that of having been born while white.

Similarly, in a recent piece for Salon.com, Chauncey DeVega takes two sentences from recent remarks by Bernie (at the rally in Boston pictured above) and then runs with it.

Bernie said, as DeVega reported: “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there.” (“Been there” as in he has met and spoken with these people, I presume he meant.)

Bernie immediately followed that up with, “Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with: It wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election.”

That apparently wasn’t convenient to DeVega’s argument, though, so he left it out of his article, which he had begun with:

In the United States, white liberals and progressives have historically shown a serious inability to grapple with the realities of the color line and the enduring power of white supremacy. Many of them are either unable or unwilling to understand that fighting against class inequality does not necessarily remedy the specific harms done to African-Americans and other people of color by white racism.

That’s just a more academic, “nicer” way of calling Bernie Sanders and his supporters “white supremacist liberals,” methinks.

Bernie also had said: “We need a Democratic Party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country; we need a party that is a grassroots party, where candidates are talking to working people, not spending their time raising money for the wealthy and the powerful.”

DeVega didn’t quote that, either. Better to simply paint Bernie as a denier of racism, because it appears that the same black Americans who stupidly supported corporate whore Billary Clinton primarily out of black identity than even for their own best fucking interests are going to try to shove corporate whore U.S. Sen. Cory Booker down our throats as the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate.

Booker is black, you see, and for years he cravenly has promoted himself as the next Barack Obama, and it’s supposed to be enough that he’s black.

Booker, whose most recent big act was to vote in the U.S. Senate to deny Americans access to cheaper pharmaceuticals because he takes a lot of money from Big Pharma — I don’t call someone a “corporate whore” for nothing — very much appears to me to be the next one to take the mantle of being Best for Blacks (this mantle was passed from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Billary Clinton and, I surmise, now goes to Booker; the mantle keeps getting passed, even though no one who wears it actually does anything significant for black Americans).

If I’m “racist” for being a while male who has called Cory Booker a corporate whore, know that the managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, a Bruce A. Dixon, earlier this year called Booker a “corporate hooker” and a “corporate whore.” He wrote (the links are his):

After losing the White House to the most unpopular president in history, Democrats have lots to say, but even more to avoid saying, lest they expose themselves as every bit as much corporate tools as their Republican foes.

New Jersey [U.S.] Senator Cory Booker is their ideal spokesperson, a cynical, photogenic and utterly dependable corporate whore who can be counted on to keep the anti-Trump rabble safely inside the Democrats’ big stinky tent. …

The Democrats leading the charge against Trump must meet exacting qualifications. They have to be loyal servants of the one percenters, of banksters, hedge funds, charter-school sugar daddies and privatizers of all kinds. They must be dependable supporters of apartheid Israel, of military contractors, drone warfare and U.S. military interventions of all kinds around the world.

To boost their party’s fortunes in this new era, Democratic Party spokespeople need to be gifted hypocrites willing to pose as advocates of immigrants and champions of civil liberties going forward, even though they unflinchingly supported the biggest deportation and mass-surveillance regimes in history implemented by the Democrat who just left the White House.

They must focus narrowly on the handful of issues on which corporate Dems actually disagree with Republicans, like abortion rights [and, I’ll add, LGBT rights — and other identity politics], and not stray to areas which might indict their own party along with Republicans.

And they must absolve their party of responsibility for running an incompetent campaign by blaming the Russians. Hillary is history, but her big stinking tent is still there, and Democrats are crying for a “united front” against Trump, led by spokespeople who can stick to the corporate script.

Cory Booker is a great fit. As Glen Ford, who has followed his career in Black Agenda Report and Black Commentator since 2002, notes, charter-school sugar daddies from the Olin, Bradley and Walton Family Foundations and the Manhattan Institute funded his early career. Cory’s wealthy friends bankrolled and promoted a slick Hollywood documentary, “Street Fight,” to ensure his 2006 election to Newark’s City Hall. …

In 2010 on the Oprah show, Booker announced a $100 million “gift” from Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg to Newark’s public schools, whose budget was still controlled by statehouse Republicans, to implement the latest “run-the-school-like-a-business” nostrums of Cory’s old friends. Three years later, when Booker left Newark for the U.S. Senate, there was little to show for the money.

The one percenters take good care of their guy Cory, giving him three times the cash raised for all his opponents together in the 2013 Democratic primary, and he takes good care of them.

When the anti-Romney rhetoric in 2012 strayed to touch on how the hedge fund Republican actually made those millions, it was Obama surrogate Cory Booker who stepped up on “Meet The Press” to defend the predatory economics of hedge funds, calling outrage against disaster capitalism “useless rhetoric.”

After all, Goldman Sachs was and still is one of Booker’s major contributors. Cory hit the Senate just in time to vote for a major school voucher bill in 2014. …

Cory’s a whore, but a loyal one. If he did for passing motorists what he does for charter-school sugar daddies, hedge funds, Israeli apartheid and Big Pharma, he could be arrested for prostitution.

But Cory’s in the big time, and he’s a leading Democratic spokeshead against Trump. If you’re a Democrat, he’s one of your leaders.

He’s Cory Booker, corporate hooker.

The battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party continues. Ain’t nothin’ changed but the date.

To be clear, I wholly agree with Chauncey DeVega’s assertion that “fighting against class inequality does not necessarily remedy the specific harms done to African-Americans and other people of color by white racism.” It is a mistake to ignore racism (and other forms of discrimination) and to focus only on class and income inequality.

However, nor should identity politics supplant the battle against income inequality, and that’s what we saw happen with Billary Clinton’s awful presidential campaign, and that’s what has happened with the establishmentarian Democratic Party, because the establishmentarian Democratic Party’s corporate sugar daddies are OK with identity politics, since for the most part identity politics doesn’t threaten their obscene profiteering (indeed, they even have found that in many instances, they can profit from identity politics).

Significantly addressing income inequality, however, does threaten the establishmentarian Democratic Party’s corporate sugar daddies’ profiteering, and that’s why the establishmentarian Democratic Party has refused to significantly address income inequality for decades.

And further to be clear, a huge chunk of those who voted for Pussygrabber indeed were motivated, at least unconsciously if not always consciously, by racism. I believe that and so I wouldn’t have gone as far as Bernie Sanders did in his remarks (specifically I refer to his remark that “Some people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there”).

Or I at least would have said it differently; I surmise that Bernie’s meaning, which he did not express well, was that not all of the people who voted for Pussygrabber are racists and sexists and homophobes and otherwise deplorables.

I think that that’s most likely what Bernie meant and I think that that’s probably the truth; I think that there are some incredibly stupid white people who voted for Pussygrabber against their own best interests, incredibly stupidly truly believing that (billionaire!) Pussygrabber magically was going to “make America great again,” that he’d bring all of the jobs back, and with those jobs, the 1950s-era national prosperity. For those people, it seems to me, identity politics wasn’t their No. 1 concern; the economy and their own dismal personal experience of it was.

What Bernie is trying to do, I surmise, is get back some of those white voters in the Rust-Belt states who voted for Pussygrabber instead of for Billary and who thus threw the Electoral College to Pussygrabber. No, I don’t think that Bernie wants the racists and the sexists and the homophobes, but that he wants those whose No. 1 concern is the economy. But they probably won’t vote for a Democrat as long as the Democratic Party keeps calling them “deplorables,” as deplorable as many (if not even most) of them actually are.

White Americans still make up more than 60 percent of the nation’s population (per the U.S. Census Bureau), and calling them deplorable probably isn’t a great strategy to win a presidential election. Just sayin’. It’s the numbers, folks; whites remain the racial majority in the United States of America.

And as deplorable as many if not even most Pussygrabber voters are, I still put the onus for Pussygrabber’s “win” of the White House on Billary Clinton. She took the Rust-Belt states for granted because they’d gone to the Democratic presidential candidates since the 1980s, and so she’d thought that she already had them sewn up. She and her team of Billarybots in their bubble fucked up big time, Russia or no Russia.

I agree wholeheartedly with Bernie’s assertion that “It wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic Party lost the election.”

If the Democratic Party fronts yet another corporate whore in 2020 — like Cory Booker — then the result will be the same. (Don’t even make me get into the cliche of the definition of “insanity.”)

The fight for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination will be much like the 2016 fight, I think, except that while the 2016 racial battle (Bernie was the “white” candidate and Billary the “black” candidate) for the most part wasn’t very openly, frequently nationally discussed, the racial battle will be quite openly and frequently nationally discussed in 2020 (well, starting no later than in 2019).

It really comes down to this: Which candidate is the most progressive? Which candidate is most likely to carry out policies that would benefit the highest number of Americans possible?

Would that candidate be yet another corporate whore, who has a long record of doing only what’s best for his or her corporate sponsors (and thus his or her corporate overlords)? Would that candidate be a corporate whore who only cravenly can run only on identity politics, since his or her actual record only shows what a corporate whore he or she actually is?

Or would the candidate most likely to carry out policies that would benefit the highest number of Americans possible (which is my non-negotiable litmus test) be an actual progressive, such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who has a long actual record of opposing corporate malfeasance and standing up for the average American?

For those of us who oppose the illegitimate Pussygrabber regime, that’s our choice in 2020, as it was in 2016.

I’m sure that if the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment fronts corporate hooker Cory Booker, it and the Bookerbots (Hookerbots?) will call those of us actual Democrats (that is, we true progressives) who oppose Booker “racist,” just as the Billarybots called those of us who rejected her for the very same reasons “sexist” and “misogynist.”

Calling those of us who rejected corporate whore Billary Clinton (because she is a corporate whore) “Bernie bros” didn’t win her the White House, did it?

Craven identity politics (including slandering one’s actually progressive political opponents as “racist” or “sexist” or whatever) won’t put Cory Booker or any other corporate whore who uses the label of “Democrat” into the White House in 2020, either.

We progressives can — and we will — keep on playing this game.

I and millions of other progressives simply won’t budge. We won’t rest until the Democratic Party is progressive again (or until it has been replaced by another actually progressive party).

Call us “sexist,” “racist,” “crazy,” “Communist,” “radical,” “extreme,” “hippie,” whatever slanderous bullshit you want to call us to lamely try to get us to acquiesce to your center-right, sellout, self-serving, pro-corporate, treasonous bullshit. Our days of supporting the sellout Democratic Party, which is just a hollow husk of what it once was, are long gone.

P.S. To be clear, I don’t want to understate the importance of the Democratic Party (or a new, truly progressive party) standing up for the civil rights of racial and other minorities. It’s that we must walk and chew gum at the same time. Engaging in identity politics (in the good, non-toxic way) or battling income inequality is a false choice. We must do both.

And of course Bernie Sanders can’t know what it’s like to be black. (Or Latino. Or a woman. Or gay. Or…) He can know only what it’s like to be Bernie Sanders. And the state that he has represented in Congress since the early 1990s, Vermont, is overwhelmingly white, which is what it is.

I believe that Bernie’s heart is in the right place, and that as president he’d do the right thing for the highest number of people possible, and that with continued dialogue, he would get even better in terms of understanding and representing minority groups’ concerns.

Sadly and pathetically, though, I sense that blacks’ biggest problem with Bernie hasn’t actually been that he has been deficient on black issues, but that he isn’t black. Under these black supremacists’ “logic,” a U.S. president (at least a Democratic U.S. president) from here on out must always be black, then, even though blacks are only 13 percent of Americans. (Gee, that’s fair! And so democratic!)

I’m gay, but I’m not going to demand that a presidential candidate be gay, even though we have yet to have our first out non-heterosexual president.

I’m going to demand only that a presidential candidate be progressive, and I’m always going to support the most progressive (yet still viable) presidential candidate, regardless of that candidate’s sex, race, sexual orientation or age (as long as he or she can still do the job, I’m not worried about a candidate’s age). Unlike it is for too many so-called Democrats, for me it’s not all about me and my own identity group. It’s about what’s best for the highest number of people.

The Democratic Party shouldn’t be the vehicle through which any minority group tries to gain political control of the majority. I will put that fact out there, because that’s what identity politics, in its most toxic forms, actually aims for: the tyranny of the minority over the majority.

That’s not progressive and that’s not democratic.

Finally, for the record, I’m fine with Elizabeth Warren as the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee if Bernie doesn’t run, but I’m concerned that her nationwide favorability ratings aren’t nearly as high as Bernie’s.

That disparity is due, I’m sure, because he already has conducted a presidential campaign, and thus is better known to the national electorate, and I surmise that Warren has been a victim of actual misogyny (recall that Yertle McConnell infamously said of Warren, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted”) more than Billary Clinton ever has been. (People just don’t like Billary, regardless of her sex. It’s her personality, her character and her record, not her XX chromosomes. [Nor is it Russia.])

What I hope happens is that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren keep working together as a dynamic duo. A Sanders-Warren ticket for 2020 would be incredible.

—

*To be fair, plenty of faux feminists also discriminated against Bernie because he is a man, and supported Billary for no other apparent reason than that she is a woman.

To support one person over another primarily because of his or her sex is to be sexist.

Why I am not a white supremacist

Shit like this blows my mind: The Washington Post reports that these fliers were found at a campus of the University of Maryland this week:

Washington Post images

Reports the Post:

Fliers linked to a white supremacist group were found this week on the campus of the University of Maryland in College Park, authorities said, part of what appears to be a new effort targeting colleges in several states.

The fliers featured the logo of American Vanguard, a group associated with white supremacy. One read “We have a right to exist” and another read “Defending your people is a social duty not an anti-social crime.”

“We hear it every day: ‘Whiteness’ is evil, and must be destroyed,” the group said in a statement on its website. “Our religion, our traditions, and our identity are dragged through the mud by the globalist establishment while millions of nonwhites flood our nation every year. If current trends continue, White Americans will be a minority by 2044. It’s time to take a stand.”

As first reported in the school’s Diamondback newspaper, University of Maryland police responded to Marie Mount Hall at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday for a report of vandalism and discovered several fliers posted at the main entrance and the south entrance. Another set of fliers was discovered posted to pillars at Tydings Hall at around 10 a.m. Monday, a spokesman for the University of Maryland Police said, and the fliers at both locations were removed.

A spokesman for U-Md. Police said the fliers would be investigated as vandalism and might be considered a hate incident.

American Vanguard, based in California, has posted fliers on other U.S. campuses, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Its posters were found at Purdue University in Indiana, the University of Central Florida, Florida Gulf Coast University, the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and Emerson College in Massachusetts in recent weeks, the ADL said.

Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s center on extremism, said he has been seeing a proliferation of white supremacist, alt-right messaging at college campuses around the country in recent weeks. “It seems to be an extension of this effort by the alt-right and their supporters to try to reach younger audiences,” he said.

Segal also said some white supremacists have perceived Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election as a victory for their cause, leading to hate incidents around the country. “I feel like the alt-right in general thinks this is the time to pounce,” he said. …

Wow. It disappoints me that “American Vanguard” is based in my state.

Speaking of my state, according to at least one source, California was the 48th whitest state in 2004 (with only Mississippi, the District and Columbia and Hawaii having a smaller percentage of whites). That source puts California’s white-alone population in 2004 at 63 percent of the state’s total population.

The U.S. Census Bureau now puts California’s white-alone population at only 38 percent, its Latino population at 38.8 percent, its Asian population at 14.7 percent, and its black population at 6.5 percent.

Yes, a little while ago Latinos surpassed whites here in California, so that now more Californians are Latino than of any other race. And Latinos in California and elsewhere throughout the United States will continue to outgrow whites.

Indeed, apparently the projection is that by 2044 or 2045, white Americans no longer will be the majority of Americans.

Do I feel like my “whiteness” is under threat? (I do have blue eyes, light skin and brown hair, and I did genetic testing some years ago that put my genetic ancestry most likely with the dominant genetic populations of Britain and/or Germany.)

No, I don’t.

Not only are the racial demographics in the United States changing over time, giving us plenty of time to adjust to the changes, but it doesn’t matter what race an American is. An American, to use the definition of a denizen of one of the 50 states, used to be a Native American; then to be an American meant that you probably are or were white; in the future, to be an American might mean that you probably are Latino or mixed.

Nothing is so precious about the white culture, if there is a monolithic white culture (there is not), that it would be an irretrievable loss to humankind should we see fewer and fewer blond-haired-and-blue-eyed human beings born upon the planet. White culture — hopefully only the best parts of it — will be absorbed into the overall culture anyway; it won’t be lost altogether.

As far as changing demographics in my home state of California go, no one is forcing me to learn Spanish (although I’ve been brushing up on my Spanish on my own for a while now), no one is forcing me to change my name to Roberto, no one is even forcing his or her Catholicism down my throat. (I love Mexican food, so if someone wanted to force that down my throat, I’d probably be OK with that.)

I don’t at all feel threatened that Latinos now outnumber the members of my own race in my state. For the very most part, Latinos and whites co-exist in California just fine.

I find white culture to be a bit stiff and boring, and so the injection of other cultures into white American culture is a benefit, not a threat. Other cultures show us still-dominant-in-the-U.S. whites (white-alones still are 61.6 percent of all Americans) other ways of seeing, of believing, of thinking, of living.

And we Americans get to pick and choose. I like the Spanish language. I like Mexican food. I like Cuban music. (I’d love to visit Cuba before I die.) I like the leftist politics that we’ve seen throughout Latin America throughout time. (Yes, I’ve been a fan of both the late Hugo Chavez and the late Fidel Castro — no, I’m not in agreement with everything that they did, but I like that they stood up to the evil empire in the north instead of selling their people out to the plutocratic plunderers of the north.)

But I remain free to hate any or all of those things if I choose. The only thing about the Latino culture that I’m not crazy about is its rampant Catholicism, but, again, no one is forcing me to become a Catholic. (It would take something like the Spanish Inquisition 2.0 for me to “convert” to that oppressive, patriarchal and misogynist, fairly racist [or at the very least Eurocentric], homophobic, backasswards, toxic institutionalized religion.)

In terms of religion, when I’m not feeling atheist-y, I gravitate toward the Eastern religions, especially Buddhism. I’m not a practicing Buddhist, but I’m fairly familiar with Buddhism, and while I wouldn’t swallow, hook, line and sinker all of its teachings any more than I would any other religion’s, Buddhism is the major world religion that makes more sense to me than does any of the others, especially Judaism, what passes for Christianity, and Islam.

I admire Asians, perhaps especially the Vietnamese, whose food I love. My best friend in junior high school and high school was half-Vietnamese; born in Vietnam, as a child he had come to the United States with his Vietnamese mother. He had a bit of a mischievous streak about him, but he was very bright and was a good friend.

Black culture is infused into the culture of the United States to the point that many if not most blacks often complain that elements of their culture have been stolen by whites. Hey, black Americans, we bland white Americans need that spice. Without it, you’d be blinded by our whiteness, too. (Melting pot, baby!)

One of my favorite books is an old one, La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race), by the late prominent Mexican José Vasconcelos. Published in 1925, in his treatise Vasconcelos did assert some things that today we’d find racially stereotypical at best, but his overall theme — that the mixing of the races is beneficial, not harmful, to humankind — was forward-thinking for its time and holds true for today.

Wikipedia notes of La Raza Cósmica:

Published in 1925, La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race) is an essay written by late Mexican philosopher, secretary of education, and 1929 presidential candidate, José Vasconcelos to express the ideology of a future “fifth race” in the Americas; an agglomeration of all the races in the world with no respect to color or number to erect a new civilization: Universópolis.

As he explains in his literary work, armies of people would then go forth around the world professing their knowledge. Vasconcelos continues to say that the people of the Iberian regions of the Americas (that is to say, the parts of the continent colonized by Portugal and Spain*) have the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the “universal era of humanity.”

Claiming that the Darwinist ideologies are “scientific” theories only created to validate, explain, and justify ethnic superiority and to repress others, Vasconcelos attempts to refute these theories and goes on to recognize his words as being an ideological effort to improve the cultural morale of a “depressed race” by offering his optimistic theory of the future development of a cosmic race. …

Any biologist will tell you that a species that never gets any genetic variation introduced into its gene pool (usually because of isolation) is at risk for extinction because its genetic code never gets any updates, so to speak.

This is true not only for the human animal on the biological level — think of the common results of inbreeding — but it is true for the human animal on the cultural level.

Cultural isolation leads to cultural stagnation, and cultural stagnation often leads to cultural extinction.

White supremacists speak endlessly of strength, but ironically, the genetic and cultural isolationism that they espouse (whites must only reproduce with other whites and the white culture must be “defended” and all other cultures rejected) is a fucking recipe for literal and cultural extinction.

That which does not bend will break in the wind. White supremacists do their fellow whites no favor by advocating staunch rigidity when the changes that we have been experiencing on many levels call instead, loudly and clearly, for flexibility and adaptability.

To be clear, just as there are white supremacists, there are Latino supremacists, Asian supremacists, black supremacists, et. al., people who believe that their race is the best, or, at least, the only race that really matters.

Racial supremacism of any kind is an unfortunate, harmful disease, but in the United States of America of course white supremacism has been the most prevalent and most harmful racial supremacism, but even with that historical fact, no one is really saying that whites don’t have the right to exist, as the flier pictured above alleges.

The supposed war on whites is as bogus as is the supposed war on Christmas (the “war on Christmas,” of course, is just an aspect of the “war on whites”; often, if not even usually, in fact, it’s just code for “war on whites”).

No one, with the exception of a crazy, relative very few, has called for the extermination of white Americans. Very most often it’s white Americans calling for the extermination of other races, or, if not their extermination, then at least their banishment, as is the case with how millions of white, Trump-loving Americans believe that brown-skinned and/or Spanish-speaking individuals all should be banished to the south of the Great White Wall that Der Fuhrer Trump has promised to erect. (After all, these brown-skinned hordes are threatening what it means to be an American — which is to be white!)

So it’s always interesting to see white supremacists claim that whites actually are the victims. Fucking losers.

This is not to say that it’s OK to shit and piss on a white person primarily or even solely because he or she is white. That’s called racism. And you don’t correct racial injustice by committing even more racial injustice yourself.

Nor do you get to punish the son for the sins of the father, so to speak. Because a person is white doesn’t mean that he or she is the descendant of a white slaveholder any more than it means that a person who is a black is a descendant of black slaves. (Barack Obama, for instance, is not. And there are plenty of whites who immigrated to the U.S. after slavery was abolished. And most Southerners didn’t hold slaves during the years of slavery; you had to be pretty rich to hold a lot of slaves.) But even if someone were proven to be the descendant of a slaveholder, do you really get to punish him or her for something that happened when he or she was not even alive?

Slavery was a colossal sin that never should have happened and that can’t be undone. It never should be minimized, but it also shouldn’t keep blacks and whites hating each other in perpetuity. It is the national wound that won’t heal, and even then there are plenty of other wounds, such as the decimation of the Native Americans, who rarely are mentioned in discussions of race; the internment of the Japanese and other mistreatment of Asians throughout U.S. history; and the ongoing prejudice against Latinos, against whom we are told by our pussy-grabbing “president”-“elect” that we must built a huge wall — you know, in order to “make America great again.”

In regards to the second white-supremacist flier shown above, I fully agree that “defending [my] people is [my] social duty.” It’s that I define “my people” very differently than do the white supremacists.

While I don’t at all call myself a Christian, as I reject institutionalized Christianity and don’t believe in bullshit like virgin births and resurrections, there is a quote of Jesus that I find interesting. Three of the four gospels give some version of it. Here it is in Matthew 12:46-50:

⁴⁶ While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. ⁴⁷ Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”

⁴⁸ He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”⁴⁹ Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. ⁵⁰ For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

I always have interpreted this to mean that Jesus (at least the Jesus of the New Testament as he is written about in the New Testament, whether there actually was a historical Jesus or not) did not believe that mere genetic closeness was real closeness; real closeness comes only with a shared worldview, a shared philosophy, a shared love that is not racially or otherwise exclusive, but is universal, all-encompassing.

I extend the definition of genetic closeness beyond the genetic closeness that one sees in his or her nuclear and extended family to the genetic closeness within one’s own race; having said that, again, I maintain that mere genetic closeness does not confer real closeness, and that perhaps is where the white supremacists err the most.

That another person is white doesn’t mean that he or she and I automatically have this bond. We don’t. I don’t care what’s in your genetic code; I care what’s in your heart and mind.

All human beings have the right to exist. White supremacists and other racial supremacists, however, care only about the welfare of the members of their own race. Tragic.

Defending our people indeed is our social duty, but our definition of “our people” had better include all human beings.

—

*It’s true that Vasconcelos is partial to the Iberian Peninsula, probably especially to Spain, but it’s also true that the Spanish conquerors did something that the white, non-Hispanic European conquerors were loathe to do: they routinely interbred with the peoples they conquered.

Thus, today’s populations of Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, et. al., have Spanish blood in them, as the population of Brazil has Portuguese blood in it.

The willingness to mix racially is laudable, even necessary for the long-term survival of humankind, as I have established, but it’s also important not to feel that one’s own race is superior or supreme… And one could argue that Vasconcelos in his La Raza Cósmica at times at least verges on that.

Cops’ first robo-killing is probably the scariest part of a week full of horrors

Corrected below (on Monday, July 11, 2016)

Last night in Dallas, Texas, cops for the first time ever used a robot to kill a perp on American soil, actually claiming that it was the only way. If we let this horrific abuse of police power pass, do we civilians not face routine robo-killings by the thugs of the state in the future? (Above is pictured one of the cops’ killing machines from the original movie “Robocop.”)

What a spectacularly fucked-up week it was, just after the Independence Day holiday on Monday, ironically.

The shooting deaths on Tuesday and on Wednesday of 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and 32-year-old Philando Castile near St. Paul, Minnesota, both of them black men, by white cops sure looked unnecessary.

It’s true that we don’t have every piece of information, and nor do we have full video footage of everything from beginning to end — the Sterling videos that I have seen start just before he is shot to death in a parking lot, and the Castile video starts after he already has been shot in a car (and is dying) — and the officers involved in the shootings deserve to be tried in real courts of law, not in the court of public opinion (which these days is held largely if not mostly on the Internet), but from what we know thus far, the shootings sure appear to have been wholly unnecessary.

My best guess is that these were spooked, adrenalized cops who were too trigger-happy, and, in a society in which black men’s lives are at the bottom of the pecking order where the value of human life is concerned, these cops just weren’t very concerned about not shooting first and asking questions later.

Then came the shooting deaths of five cops last night in Dallas (not far from where JFK was assassinated) by an-as-far-as-we-know-right-now militarily trained lone wolf, 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a black man of the Dallas area who reportedly had claimed that he especially wanted to kill white cops for the wrongful killings of black men by white cops.

On NPR today I heard the head of the nation’s largest cops’ union embarrass himself by stating that the shootings of cops because they are cops need to be treated as hate crimes. 

He further embarrassed himself by actually stating that just as we shouldn’t hate others because of the color of their skin, we shouldn’t hate anyone because of the color of his or her uniform (yes, he actually used those incredibly corny words). He asserted this as though the problem that so many of us have had with our cops actually were the color of their uniforms, or, OK, the fact in and of itself that they are cops — and not, oh, say, their rampant abuse of power and deadly force, such as by blowing away unarmed or otherwise non-threatening black men and by otherwise abusing their power against people of color and other vulnerable minorities.

The cops have had a long history of abusing their power in the United States of America. Many of them have been little more than state-sanctioned thugs, and let’s face it: The cops’ main job is to maintain the socioeconomic status quo, a status quo that isn’t about liberty and justice for all.

That said, don’t get me wrong; I don’t advocate the killing of one member of a group because you’re pissed off at another member of that group, be that group a racial group, a religious group, an occupational group, or any other group of people. I believe that we must deal with individuals, and not with entire groups of people. Micah Johnson’s “logic” that because two white cops in Louisiana and in Minnesota apparently unnecessarily killed — maybe murdered (well, maybe it was manslaughter; it’s all in the intent) — two black men, he should kill cops (especially white cops) in Texas speaks for itself.

And let’s be clear in our thinking and in our words: Blacks didn’t kill those cops in Dallas; one apparently mentally ill, or at the very least seriously unhinged, young black man did. (I don’t assert that Johnson had no legitimate grievances, but murdering random cops because they’re cops isn’t OK.) And all (white) cops did not kill Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (and way too many others); specific (white) cops killed them.

The problem is when we hold an entire group of people guilty for the acts of a relative few. It’s a mistake that often has deadly consequences and that can spiral into something like a civil war.

On the issue of hate crimes, I don’t argue that Micah Johnson didn’t hate cops; he very apparently did. (Again, I don’t argue that he had no grounds for his hatred; I only point out that he apparently had that hatred.)

But let’s be crystal fucking clear on what a hate crime is. Wikipedia defines a hate crime thusly:

A hate crime … is a prejudice-motivated crime, often violent, which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership (or perceived membership) in a certain social group.

Examples of such groups can include but are not limited to: sex, ethnicity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation. …

“Hate crime” generally refers to criminal acts that are seen to have been motivated by bias against one or more of the types above, or of their derivatives. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, … or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).

Cops aren’t listed among the groups that so often are targeted in hate crimes, and implied but not explicitly spelled out in Wikipedia’s entry on hate crimes is the power differential that we have seen in the vast majority of hate crimes committed in the United States of America.

Whites who have committed hate crimes against blacks, for example, usually have far outnumbered blacks; ditto for “Christians” who have far outnumbered Jews and Muslims; heterosexuals and gender-conforming individuals who have far outnumbered non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals; etc. With the vast majority of hate crimes, it’s the relatively powerful who are targeting the less powerful to even the relatively powerless.

One thing that we can’t say about cops is that they are relatively powerless compared to the general population. Um, they are not. Sure, we commoners far outnumber the cops, but most of us commoners don’t have their arsenals or their training — or their being backed up by the U.S. military if they need such backup. (All of this is made possible with our own tax dollars, but that’s another blog piece.) And, of course, the cops often if not usually have the full cover of the “justice” system should they ever actually be held to account in a court of law. And, of course, they know this fact even before they unnecessarily shoot someone to death, carelessly (manslaughter) or even intentionally (murder).

Therefore, call what Micah Johnson did last night in Dallas an act of terrorism — the use of fear and/or violence to try to achieve a political objective — but let’s not fucking call it a hate crime and by so doing shit and piss on all actual victims of actual hate crimes, past, present and future.

Let’s not buy the cops’ union thugs’ bullshit rhetoric that cops (as a group) now are the poor victims when American history is filled with incidents of cops’ thuggery against the populace, usually the relatively powerless.

Clearly, having had the first black man in the Oval Office hasn’t magically solved our problems. We, the people, have much work to do, primary among which is to devise non-lethal ways of neutralizing individuals whom cops deem need to be neutralized. It’s unfuckingacceptable that shooting someone in the year 2016 still is seen as an acceptable way of neutralizing him or her.

With the technology that we have, we should have solved this problem years ago.

On that note, we, the people, also must NOT allow state-sanctioned killing by robot to become the norm.

The cops in Dallas last night killed Micah Johnson by affixing a bomb to a robot, directing the robot to Johnson’s vicinity, and then detonating the bomb. It was the first time that cops anywhere on U.S. soil used a robot to kill someone.*

What the fucking fuck?

A robot that can deliver a bomb can’t deliver a tranquilizer dart or a knock-out gas? Really? Blowing Micah Johnson up via R2-D2 was the cops’ only option?

No, the cops blew Johnson up because he’d killed cops, and they wanted their instant revenge on him. The actual justice (well, “justice”) system might have allowed him to live, so they, the cops, had to be the prosecutors, judges, juries and executioners, you see.

And by so doing, the cops only further demonstrated last night that they have become a serious problem that we, the people, need to solve — lest the cops’ killer robots come for us next.

Correction (Monday, July 11, 2016): My bad: Apparently the cop who shot Philando Castile to death is Mexican American, not white. (In the viral video, only the cop’s forearms are visible, and he is light-skinned, so I’d thought that he was white.)

This is a rather ironic photo of the cop:

(No, it’s not a Photoshop job. It was taken two years ago and it’s from here.)

The cop, named Jeronimo Yanez, has claimed, via his attorney, “This had nothing to do with race. This had everything to do with the presence of a gun.” (Of course, it’s not like any cop actually would admit it if his [or her] shooting death of someone had been racially motivated…)

Our society’s racial pecking order is fairly ingrained, it seems to me, and we can internalize and act out that pecking order unconsciously, methinks.

I just can’t imagine Philando Castile having been shot to death as he was had he been white (or perhaps Asian or Latino).

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*NPR quotes a subject-matter expert as saying that bombs/explosive devices affixed to robotic devices have been used by the U.S. military in Iraq, but that last night’s was the first such use here on American soil.

Indeed, our police are becoming more and more militarized, and we, the people, fail to put a stop to this anti-constitutional bullshit at our own peril.

I vehemently oppose the use of armed/weaponized robots or drones to kill civilians on American soil — and their use in all other nations should be prohibited as well.

Black Lives Matter activist brilliantly brings Queen Billary Clinton to heel

The video grab above shows brilliant and brave activist Ashley Williams crashing Billary Clinton’s $500-a-head fundraiser at a mansion in South Carolina on Wednesday, putting Billary’s own ugly, dehumanizing, racist words right in her own face. Unfortunately, Billary very most likely still will win South Carolina by double digits today.

I find it interesting that the crashing of Billary Clinton’s exclusive, $500-a-head fundraiser at a private mansion in South Carolina this past week by a Black Lives Matter activist hasn’t received nearly the same amount of mainstream media “news” coverage that the crashing of Bernie Sander’s public appearance in Seattle in August did.

Methinks that the members of the corporately owned and controlled “news” media believe that the corporation-friendly Billary is “inevitable,” even though with 46 more states to go after today, polls have her down to only 5 percent or 6 percent ahead of Bernie Sanders among Democrats and Democratic leaners nationally — her smallest lead over Bernie ever, and dropping (see here and here) — and they don’t want to lose access to the “future” President Billary by pissing her off with any unflattering coverage now.

I note, first, that Black Lives Matter isn’t monolithic, that BLM has little to no control over who calls him- or herself a BLM activist, and that among BLM’s ranks are astute activists and, um, much less thoughtful slacktivists. The latter type crashed Bernie’s appearance in Seattle in August.

I mean, there are important differences between the two events.

In the August event, the two BLM (or self-identifying BLM) slacktivists’ main problem with Bernie apparently was (and probably still is) that he’s not black. (Yes, that is racist.) They had no coherent message or specific complaints about anything that Bernie had done or said himself. And they called the crowd of their allies gathered to hear Bernie speak “white supremacist liberals,” a wonderful touch, especially when words such as those were spoken by apparent black supremacists.

Also, of course, no one had been asked for a penny to hear Bernie Sanders speak that day at the city park in Seattle. And their constitutional (First-Amendment) right to gather peaceably was infringed upon by the BLM slacktivists, as was Bernie Sanders’ First-Amendment right to speak (and the audience’s First-Amendment right to hear him speak and perhaps ask him questions).

You don’t get to violate others’ constitutional rights like that, and the two self-identifying BLM morons who commandeered Sanders’ appearance at that city park in Seattle in August should have been asked to leave by law enforcement and then hauled away if they refused, as the constitutional rights of the many do actually outweigh the “rights”* of the few — even in “white-supremacist-liberal” Seattle.

But the slacktivists were not, to my knowledge, even asked to leave, and they certainly weren’t physically forced to leave. No one put hands on them, and ultimately Sanders left the venue in exasperation, without giving his planned speech.

By contrast, the pay-to-play Billary Clinton fundraiser that a lone BLM activist, Ashley Williams, crashed on Wednesday was at a private residence in Charleston, South Carolina. Indeed, the foyer in which Billary was blathering is reminiscent of the Southern mansion featured in the movie “Borat” in which Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat brings a woman posing as a black hooker to dinner, to the shock and horror of his white dinner hosts.

As Billary pontificated at her fundraiser on Wednesday, apparently on the topic of how much she cares about black people, Williams unfurled a sign that read, “We have to bring them to heel,” words that Billary spoke in a January 1996 speech that she gave in New Hampshire. (More fully, she said in that speech: “They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”)

Of course, the quotation is an excellent example of how Billary and Billy Boy always have tailored their words for their audience. Billary’s audience on that day in New Hampshire in January 1996 apparently was an all-white or mostly-white crowd, and apparently the topic was “criminal” “justice.” (Similarly, she told a crowd in Ohio just in September that she’s “moderate and center.” Today, she is a “progressive.”)

On Wednesday at that swank home in Charleston, Ashley Williams, apparently the only black person there at the fundraiser, said to Billary, “I’m not a super-predator, Hillary Clinton,” and “Can you apologize to black people for mass incarceration?”

If you want to see an actual crowd of “white supremacist liberals,” look at how the people at the swank fundraiser reacted to Williams. And unlike happened at Bernie’s event in August, hands were put upon Williams and she was physically escorted out.

Thankfully, it was captured on video and released for all of the world to see. It’s graphic evidence of the usually-secret world of the limousine liberal, the rich, usually white, person who talks about caring about the disadvantaged and the dispossessed but whose actions and luxurious lifestyle reveal something else altogether.

Oh, I’m not claiming that Ashley Williams didn’t violate anyone else’s rights at that tony Charleston house on Wednesday — I mean, I suppose that we could talk about a “right” to dutifully listen to Billary Clinton robotically drone on and on about how she cares about some group of people when all that she ever has cared about is power and money for herself and her close circle — but it was a brilliant piece of activism.

It was, entirely unlike the August debacle in Seattle, well thought-out. Williams paid the $500 to be able to be there among the almost-all-white limousine liberals and then she unfurled a banner with rather devastating words that the then-first lady had uttered herself. I mean, you talk about dogs “heeling,” not human beings. The term “super-predator” also is quite dehumanizing. 

And yes, Bill and Billary Clinton, because of her support for him, indeed are responsible for the fact that today we have and for far too many years now we have had way too many non-white men and women behind bars for “crimes” that did not involve physical violence (especially drug “crimes”).

Williams appropriately called Billary out on her hypocrisy and lies. What Williams was exposing was far more important than were the lies that Billary mechanically, second-naturedly was spewing at that fundraiser for rich people to be able to rub elbows with Queen Billary Herself (and even get selfies with Billary with which to impress their friends and family members!).

So bravo, Ashley Williams! You are one hell of an activist. You are brave, and your critique of Billary was fair, dead-on and devastating.

Unfortunately, I still expect Billary Clinton to win the South Carolina primary by double digits today.

Sadly, even if Williams had exposed Billary significantly earlier, I don’t think that it would have lost South Carolina (and the rest of the South) for her.

I mean, people who vote for and otherwise support Billary (unless they are rich) inherently are pretty fucking stupid — to vote against your own best interests, you have to be pretty fucking stupid — and so they are immune to facts and to the evidence (even evidence on video, like Ashley Williams’ gem) that Billary Clinton is, at best, just another Repugnican Lite.

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*I use quotation marks because violating others’ First-Amendment rights is not a right.